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Cutting
Everything about separating the cards lives in the export dialog's Cutting tab: cut guides for scissors or a guillotine first, registration marks for a machine below.
Short lines at every card corner showing where to cut, plus ticks in the margin lined up with each edge.
- Style. Cross is a solid plus at each corner. Corner is gapped crop marks.
- Cut guides sets the colour: White, Black, Gray, or None. Colour matters as much as width: white vanishes on a light card and black on a dark border. If a guide disappears on some cards but not others, try Gray, which survives both.
- Length and offset, in millimetres. Offset is the gap between the card's corner and where the line starts.
- Cut guides on backs too. Worth turning off when printing double-sided. The back's guides never land exactly where the front's do, so a second set that disagrees with the one you are cutting to is worse than none. You cut by the front.
Thickness is in points, and a point is small. The field shows the millimetres under it. Measured on a real sheet at 1200 DPI:
| Setting | On paper | Ink dots |
|---|---|---|
| 0.25 pt | 0.09 mm | 4 |
| 0.40 pt (default) | 0.15 mm | 7 |
| 0.60 pt | 0.21 mm | 10 |
| 1.00 pt | 0.36 mm | 17 |
0.25 pt is the thinnest it goes. Below that the line is two or three ink dots and an inkjet simply loses it. If you want no guides at all, set the colour to None rather than making them too thin to see.
Layout > Edge bleed puts a band around each card and spaces them apart, so the cut runs through the band. A cut that drifts a little then shows band, not white paper or the neighbouring card.
Bleed color is Black, White, or Extend art, which grows the card's own artwork outward instead of painting a flat frame. On a black-bordered card that continues the frame; on full art it mirrors the edge, so the picture keeps going under the cut.
Corner radius rounds the printed corners.
For print-and-cut machines, which read printed marks to find where the sheet is. Cutting > Registration marks turns them on.
- 3 marks is the standard pattern. 4 marks is for the CAMEO 5a.
- The geometry follows Silhouette Studio's own published figures: 0.394 in inset, 0.350 in (8.89 mm) length, 0.039 in thickness. A sheet then lands on a template built in Studio. If yours was built around other numbers, set these to match, and match the grid too.
The marks are corner brackets, so what blocks a slot is a mark landing on a corner card. When one would, that slot is left empty and the card moves to the next sheet. The hint under the preview names the exact Mark inset that would keep them all.
| Page | Keeps every slot at the default marks |
|---|---|
| A3, Tabloid | every layout, including 4×4 (16 cards) |
| Legal | 3×3 (9) |
| A4 | 4×2 landscape (8) or the 7-card layout (7). 3×3 drops to 6. |
| Letter | none at the defaults. Lower the inset; the hint says how far. |
Lowering the inset frees slots: on A4 3×3, going from 10 mm to 6 mm takes you from 6 cards back to 9. The floor is 3.5 mm, since most inkjets cannot print closer to the edge than that and the mark would simply be clipped off.
One card centred in the left column plus a 3×2 block. It clears both left corners, where a Cameo's key marks sit, which is the whole reason it exists.
Guides and margin ticks never print inside a mark's clear area, since a stray line beside a mark can throw the machine's scan off.
These pages are kept in wiki/ in the main repository, so they are versioned and reviewed like the code. Edits made directly here are overwritten on the next sync, so propose changes there instead.